Authorities in Singapore have charged the former CEO of collapsed crypto lender Hodlnaut Zhu Juntao with fraud, nearly four years after the firm froze withdrawals during the collapse of the TerraUSD ecosystem.
Singapore’s police force said Zhu faces six charges of fraud by false representation in a statement on Tuesday. Prosecutors allege that Zhu directed employees in 2022 to publish false statements on Hodlnaut’s Telegram channels and in customer emails that claimed the company had no direct exposure to TerraUSD’s collapse and had suffered no losses as a result.
Authorities also alleged that Zhu repeated similar claims on his personal X account, then known as Twitter, in three posts in June 2022. If convicted, Zhu could face up to 20 years in prison, fines or both for each charge under Singapore law.
Zhu contested all six charges in court and was given a date for a pretrial conference in June 2026, according to local media.
Hodlnaut was one of several crypto lenders to fail following the implosion of Terraform Labs’ algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem in May 2022. The collapse wiped around $40 billion from the crypto market and contributed to the failure of firms including Three Arrows Capital, Celsius and Voyager.
Reports filed during Hodlnaut’s restructuring proceedings indicated that the company had channeled about $317 million of user funds into Terra’s Anchor Protocol, which offered about 19.5% in annual dividends on UST deposits before the collapse, rendering UST nearly worthless.
Court-appointed receivers later estimated that Hodlnaut lost about $189.7 million due to exposure to the Terra collapse. Reports reviewed during restructuring proceedings said the company had poor internal record-keeping and that some managers did not fully cooperate with investigators.
Founded in 2019, Singapore-based Hodlnaut offered customers high-yielding crypto accounts and served more than 30,000 users globally before stopping payouts in August 2022.
The company later went into legal administration and was ordered into liquidation by the Singapore High Court.
